Fig. 3

Construction of weighted co-expression network and module analysis. A Scale-free index under various soft threshold power (β) and average connectivity analysis. B Cluster dendrogram of co-expression network module. Each color represents one specific co-expression module. C Heatmap of the correlation between the module eigengenes and clinical traits. Each row represents a color module and every column a clinical trait (UC, NC, and CAC). Each cell contains the corresponding correlation and p-value. Statistical significance was set at p < 0.05. D Dendrogram (top) and heatmap (bottom) display the strength of correlations between CAC and other modules. Red represents a higher positive adjacency and blue a lower adjacency. E Correlation between module membership of turquoise module and gene significance with CAC. F Heatmap with clusters of DEGs in turquoise module among the three different groups. UC ulcerative colitis, NC normal control, CAC ulcerative colitis-associated colorectal cancer, DEGs differentially expressed genes